Kage Baker slept later than the Rose Parade started. Whether it was on a Sunday or no, she saw no reason to get up early during vacation time. Even once she was self-employed at home, she had ordinarily spent the night before up very late indeed – dancing on the beach well past midnight, playing tag with waves in the moonlight. (Champagne was heavily involved.)

Even when I made coffee and cocoa and home-made Egg McMuffins as lures (mine are better than MacDonald’s) Kage refused to get up much before 10 AM. Luckily, the Rose Parade runs pretty much all day here is Los Angeles – over and over, taped the first time and just set on Infinite Repeat. The cool thing about the seeing it the first time is that it shows without commercials – and you get first glimpse of whatever special wonders or disasters occur along the route. Will a float get stuck in the turn at Orange? Will Cal Tech ensorcel the sprinkler system? Will a dinosaur knock its head off on a lamp post?

No end of fun.

My sister Kimberly is a morning person. For her, the 8 AM kick-off is mid-morning; she’s usually been up and doing since 5:30 or so. She’s used to watching the Rose Parade alone the first time, before her husband and son (and now her narcoleptic sister) stir their lazy butts out of bed. But by some happy coincidence, everyone woke up this morning! Before 8! By the time the Rose Parade kicked off in the glorious morning light, the entire family – even the animals – were settled in the living room all bright-eyed and anticipatory.

Haven’t had a Rose Parade morning like that in decades … We ate lemon bars and bagels, cheered for the marching bands, laughed at the silly signs in the audience. Felt sorry for the young ladies in high heels and skimpy costumes, resolutely marching the miles-long route with the morning sun in their eyes. Rooted indiscriminately for the representative Rose Bowl teams, since none of us cared who won – though Wisconsin’s Badger was adjudged the more amusing mascot.

And when it was over – I went back to bed. Only got up a little while ago to hunt for more collard greens. Collard greens are part of the New Year’s magic; you eat them to insure that folding money will come your way in the coming year. It’s never – quite – failed me.

So I’ve spent my time lazing around in these days that don’t quite exist; New Year’s Day pushed back 24 hours to accommodate the parade, a fine sleepy holiday where you can’t remember what day it is and it doesn’t even matter. As Kage always maintained, this week between Christmas and New Year’s is free time: we exist in another plane during it, and can relax all we like.

Tomorrow the year will wake up, and the week will resume, and I will spend another morning on hold with various medical offices. Hopefully, I’ll chisel a surgery date out of the resistant clay of the heath care system. All the more reason to rest up now. It takes a lot of energy to battle the status quo. The Universe, it appears, prefers entropy to energy, and favours stagnation most of all.

But here in the sheltered backwater of the calendar, I’ve been making my plans. Tomorrow I rise and strike! Sennacherib will fall before my cohorts! I’ll cut through the Gordian Knot of bureaucracy with one blow of my snickersee!

See if I don’t, 2012.